


no question

by winchysteria



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Farmer POV, Fluff, Happy Ending, Sports, Volleyball, found sports family trope fight me, like nobody's injured but the idea is touched on v briefly, mention of head injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 15:08:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18995095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winchysteria/pseuds/winchysteria
Summary: It is a well-curated myth that Caitlin Farmer has been certain about everything she has ever done in her entire life.--a check please reverse bang fic!!





	no question

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to tangotangredi on tumblr for the GORGeOUS ART inspiration and for dealing with my godawful time management skills & thank you to my laptop keyboard for breaking!! i just really love caitlin farmer you know?  
> [Here's the gorgeous gifset!](https://tangotangredi.tumblr.com/post/185188972674/no-question-written-by-winchysteria-art-for)  
> 

 

 

It is a well-curated myth that Caitlin Farmer has been certain about everything she has ever done in her entire life. Caitlin herself is not entirely sure where this began, but she thinks it has something to do with the way she walks, as if her feet carry a little extra weight, or the breadth of her shoulders or the focused expression she wears when she forgets what her face is doing. Ever since she was a little kid, people very rarely asked Caitlin Farmer questions like “Are you sure?”

And so Caitlin Farmer learned not to hem and haw before giving answers, and she learned to take no more or less than two seconds before nodding yes or no to anything, and she learned to very, very rarely change her mind. She trusted her instincts. She became a clear-voiced, well-respected leader. And she grew, little by little, to trust her own judgment absolutely.

It was useful, you know? If people thought you never doubted yourself, they were far less likely to argue with you.

So when she mutters “kill her” to Maggie Dormund as she sets her up for a spike, Maggie does it. It’s terrifying in the way only great volleyball is; Maggie rears back like a python and delivers the ball with a noise too big to be called a  _ smack _ to the Stanford outside hitter’s feet. The shot is glorious, effective, and nowhere near enough to keep them from losing the second set. Caitlin still gives her an encouraging shoulder rub as they trot off-court: “Great shot, Mr. Worldwide.”

Maggie smiles back at her, eyes tight. Poor kid might be 6’1’’ and tough as nails, but she’s also only a freshman, and the Stanford line still makes Caitlin feel a little sick to her stomach.

God.

_ Fuck _ Stanford.

The worst part is that the coaches think they’re going to lose. Caitlin is sure of it. Or, to be generous, they won’t be surprised if Samwell loses. It’s fair, she supposes; it’s a small miracle Samwell made it to regional finals at all, and Stanford hasn’t been knocked out before final four since Caitlin was in high school. Plus, with the way March is still peaky from last week’s flu, they’re not playing their best, even if April is mustering enough energy to be both captains. Still, she looks at the way Castilla exhales in resignation before telling them lines for the third set and she hates her for it. Just a little bit.

Fifteen seconds before the end of the interval, as she tucks her flyaways back into her headband, Caitlin hears Liv’s signature boom: “Farms! Farmer’s moms! Your cheerleading section is here!”

Sure enough, when Caitlin turns around, there they are: loud as hell, behaving like giant assholes, and blocking the view of at least three rows of people sitting behind them. Her boys.

She  _ knew _ it. She  _ knew _ there was a reason they’d been so flaky about the hockey schedule for this weekend. Bitty told her they had a roadie, but not when they’d be leaving or coming back. Nursey had pretended he didn’t even know what the schedule was and was just planning on letting Dex wake him up whenever they needed to leave. (In fairness to Caitlin, this was totally believable coming from Nurse.) But she hadn’t expected them to actually show up here with Samwell-colored faces and jerseys and feather boas. She certainly hadn’t expected Ransom and Holster, who are drunk in an orderly way, or Lardo, whose face just barely peeks out over the top of a large posterboard that says YO MARRY M E FARMS. Sh e probably should have, though. Because behind only her immediate family and her own team, those are her favorite damn people in the world.

And Chris Chowder, right in the middle, holding the THAT’S MY GIRLFRI E ND sign in his gangly arms, is by far her favorite thing she’s ever been certain about.

 

_ “Oof, ow, shit, Nurse I swear to God I’m going to--” _ is the only warning Caitlin gets before she hits the ground. She and Raquel and Liv and at least a few other people go down  _ hard _ , landings padded somewhat by the quad’s infestation of leaf piles. Caitlin had been turned away from the sidewalk, which means she got less warning before somebody played human bowling with her team, but also means that she could at least catch herself on her hands and knees. Or she would have, if what felt like several hundred pounds of person hadn’t landed squarely on top of her.

“Get  _ off _ of me,” she squawks immediately, desperately trying to regain her usual veneer of dignity but still unsure which direction was up and how many people she was getting crushed under. She feels around for a pair of shoulders, which are broader than expected, and then starts pushing with every ounce of volleyball-smashing power she has.

There’s only one person in leaf pile with her after all-- a boy, and an athlete, judging by the muscles in his upper body. To his credit, he starts apologizing before he even gets control of his arms: “Sorry, sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry, let me-- oops, sorry-- I’ll just--”

She counts twelve “sorry”s before she even manages to sit up and brush the debris out of her eyes.

“Are you hurt?” Missile Boy says, eyes shiny. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, I’m really sor--”

“Not hurt,” Caitlin interrupts, even though she’s not entirely sure. “But if anyone on my team is, I will kick your ass, because regionals start in, like, three days.”

“I’m really--” the guy starts again, and she tunes him out as she glances around to make sure no one died. Raquel is already on her feet and chewing out some redhead with ears that stick out like the side mirrors on a vintage pickup. Liv looks disgruntled, but unharmed, as a dark-haired Hottie McHotterson helps her pick up the contents of her backpack.

“Look, I appreciate the apology,” Caitlin says, cutting Captain Sincerity off in the middle of his sentence as she picks a few leaves out of her hair. “But you can calm down.”

She flips her head over for a brief finger-comb to make sure everything’s out. When she flips it back up, the guy is staring at her with wide, dark eyes. And nice cheekbones. And--

Caitlin bursts out laughing.

“What?” he says immediately, without a hint of irritation. “Oh my god, did you hit your head? Did I give you a concussion? Oh, no--”

He reaches forward to awkwardly pat the sides of her head as if looking for a bump. Caitlin pulls his hands away as she catches her breath. “No, it’s just--” she hiccups. “You look like fuckin’ Tarzan.”

Another wave of hysterics hits her as she reaches forward to pluck a twig out of Chris’s hair. And then a second, and a third. That one has a couple of leaves on the end, like it fell straight out of a Winnie the Pooh cartoon. She twirls it at him. “How’d you even do that, dude?”

He reaches up to scratch the back of his head bashfully. His hand comes away with another stick, this one long enough to fork. Twice.

He bursts into giggles.

 

Caitlin still remembers, with perfect clarity, how she and her friends had stared after them as they left the quad. She remembers how Raquel had said “ _ Jee _ -sus,” and then how Caitlin herself said, “I’m going to marry that guy.”

They’d all stared at her in disbelief.

“Those are  _ hockey players,” _ Liv had said in disgust. “Are you crazy?”

Caitlin had just shrugged. “We’ll figure it out.”

 

The third match feels different from the start. Castilla sends March in, who, although a little less sharp than usual, is always spectacular. There’s a reason she and April are captains.

She blows a kiss to the hockey section as she jogs on. Ransom catches it with a little magical-girl pose that makes both April and Holster cackle. They are, collectively, the exception to the rule: a group of friends that rose from the ashes of an awkward breakup. After the end of March-and-Justin, Caitlin had expected their little cobbled-together hockey-volleyball stepfamily to crumble, but first game after the breakup, the boys were still there. They even brought the same signs.

This year, with Ransom, Holster, and Lardo down in Boston, things are different. But today they’re back. It’s not a magic spell or anything, but as Farmer hunkers down to wait for the first serve, she feels energy hit her veins like ice water.

She’s also sure about volleyball. That one’s always been simple. She used to watch her mom on the beach with her aunts, bumping the ball around for hours, a blend of leonine strength and obvious delight: one second skidding to the ground after a runaway spike, the next bursting into peals of laughter as they scraped sand out of their ears. Her heart had beat to the rhythm of it, the way play swept up and across the court like a swimmer through waves.

Raquel serves. Immediately, Caitlin can feel it: they’re back.

They climb to five-five before she can blink twice. Then ten-six. They’re fluid, cohesive-- not perfect, but a thing of beauty nonetheless. Stanford still doesn’t even start to crack until the third set is over: the last point is hers, an unremarkable bump that Stanford’s outside hitter grazes before it goes out-of-bounds. It’s an effortful but decisive win for Samwell.

“That’s Caitlin  _ fucking _ Farmer!” she hears Holster yell from the stands as she roars off for the third interval.

“You’re killing it, kiddo,” April says, smacking a kiss to the side of Caitlin’s head. She’s not tall enough to reach the top.

“Thanks, Mom,” Caitlin says, pinching April’s side.

“Look at my little star,” March gushes on cue. She ruffles Caitlin’s ponytail.

“Thanks, Mama,” Caitlin replies. Her role in this whole charade is to act grumpy and embarrassed, but she can’t quite wipe the smile off her face.

Caitlin doesn’t remember when this joke started, that March and April were her loving gay moms. For Secret Santa last year, Audra Ramirez made them both fake Samwell Volleyball jerseys with their last names hyphenated on the back. It always  _ just _ rides the line between sweet and funny and offensive.

She knows she’s being trained into captaincy. She’s not being arrogant when she says that, either, it’s just a fact: next year, she and Raquel will co-captain. So she watches April and March closely, trying to learn from them, and she’s not entirely sure anymore how much of the joke is a joke. They walk in sync. They check in on the younger players together. They send entire sentences telepathically through the air over everyone else’s head. They have an equally inscrutable language of shoulder, hand, and arm touches that Caitlin catches every once in a while, too. When March had the flu, April didn’t leave their apartment once except for class and practice.

Secretly, Caitlin thinks they’d be good together.

Neither she nor March, who is clearly flagging, play the fourth set. They both watch play closely for a few minutes: Stanford puts up more of a fight, now, but so does Samwell. Caitlin tracks the players on both teams, watching where they’re blind or hesitant. Chris, who is sure that Caitlin is the absolute best at every activity on earth except (due only to a lack of practice) hockey, tells her she should coach.

It’s pretty tempting. 

 

As Ines pounds her next serve into the air, Caitlin sees March disappear from her peripheral vision. After a minute, she turns to see where her teammate has gone, only to see her a few feet away.

She’s at the base of the student section, starting a whisper chain with some underclassman in the front row. The kid looks about fourteen. Caitlin feels irrationally adult and responsible.  He turns to the person behind him, and they turn to the person behind them, and so on until the chain reaches Ransom and Holster. Holster looks very pleased when he hears the message, then goes a little pink. Which is weird. He reaches across to tap Chris on the stomach and gestures for his poster, the one that says THAT’S MY GIRLFRIEND.

Chris rolls it up and passes it over. Holster starts it back down the chain and into March’s hands.

_What are you-_ Caitlin mouths to her, giving a little shrug. 

March shrugs back, Little Rascals innocent.

A few minutes later, April misses a bump she would have saved if she’d been any less tired. Stanford is at twelve, thirteen now, and Caitlin sees April pinch the meat between her thumb and forefinger. Hard. It’s what she does when she’s frustrated, and Caitlin wants to tell her she’s doing objectively fantastic. Especially down a captain. Especially against Stanford.

“You got this, April!” Caitlin calls.

“GO APRIL!” March screams at the top of her lungs, jumping up to stand on the bench. Everyone glances over, including Caitlin and April herself, to see March waving around the THAT’S MY GIRLFRIEND poster like a loon. “YOU’RE A STAR!”

Caitlin starts. It’s a cute inside joke, she supposes, but a little bit over-the-top.

Then she looks back at April. April, who is staring at the bench with a mix of delighted disbelief that seems just a little bit dramatic for an elaborate inside joke.

Huh.

The coach makes March get down from the bench, although she lets out one last triumphant “THAT’S MY BABY!”

Caitlin, still nonplussed, looks back and forth between the two of them for a minute or two before she refocuses on the game itself.

April doesn’t miss any other hits.

Stanford is definitely cracking. Just a little.   
  


As she’s tapped in at 7-7 in the fifth set, Caitlin looks up to the bleachers. To Chris. She feels like a seasick mountain goat—her footing is so sure, but she can’t help the nausea. Stanford still looks terrifying. It is not the end of the world if they lose now, it’s a pleasant surprise to even be here, but Caitlin wants this so badly she can feel it taking up physical space in her torso. Her desire to beat them, for March and for April and for herself, even, lies against her spine in a way that makes her stomach churn even as it makes her feel stronger and more capable.

And she locks eyes with Chris, who is a little teary—about the whole March and April thing, she assumes, because he loves love—and the line of the horizon stabilizes. She feels that familiar grain of certainty take root, and at first she thinks it’s about the game.

_That’s odd,_ she thinks. _I don’t have any reason to believe this is a sure thing. I can believe that we have a shot. But we’re not in our absolute peak condition, and Stanford is still playing well._

She is so rarely wrong. And yet, as she looks back to the court, feeling Liv and Raquel slap her on the back in greeting, she can still feel it. The I know, I know, I know. It is not until she hears Chris scream _That’s my girl!_  from the student section that she recognizes the shape of the certainty.

It has nothing to do with the game.

And so, as she retrieves the ball from the referee, Caitlin Farmer asks herself the question that no one ever asks her.

_ Are you sure? _

And she replies to herself: _yes, I’m sure._

Caitlin has a system, you see. Even though everyone else she knows takes her word as law, more or less, or perhaps because of that fact, Caitlin is a careful stewardess of what she decides. Some things, the very small things, she can decide spontaneously: what to eat for dinner, which card to get Chris for his birthday, which route to take home from the gym. The consequences are minimal, and so is her deliberation. She trusts that her first instinct has taken the relevant factors into account.   
For another type of decision, one that carries more weight, she gives herself a few seconds: what to do when she caught one of the freshmen cheating in the bio class she TA’ed for, who to talk to when her sophomore year roommate was struggling, what to say when Chris tells her that he’s bi. Those decisions aren’t harder for her to make, really, but they affect someone else, and so she logs her first instinct, deliberates for three seconds, and then makes changes to the game plan as needed. For instance, in the last case, she had initially wanted to say “Okay, cool. I love you.” Then she looked at Chris for those three seconds—the way he picked at a hangnail on his thumb, the two little parallel lines between his eyebrows—and said instead, “Okay, cool. I love you. I’m honored you trust me. Do you want to play Mario Kart?”

He had melted into her hug. She’d scratched the nape of his neck gently.

It's a good system.

Caitlin sets Liv up for a beautiful spike, textbook, one that soars innocently to the ground just to the left of the Stanford libero.

_Are you sure?_  she asks herself again.

She has a third system in place for big choices. She likes threes.

It’s not for the fuck-around choices, this third tier. It is for the big ones. The life ones. She used to use it more often, back when most things felt life-altering, but now the last time she can remember using it was right before she committed to Samwell. She’d asked herself, once: _are you sure?_

Her immediate answer had been that she was sure, but it didn’t feel like enough. So she asked a second time: _are you sure?_

That time she felt absolutely certain.

Sometimes, like in the ninth grade when she was deciding whether she should move to Oregon with her dad, she had to ask a third time: are you sure? And it didn’t matter, at that point, what the answer actually was. If she had to ask that third time, then she wasn’t sure. It was a moot point.

She hears Chris screaming joyfully from the crowd as the scoreboard changes. 14-11 Samwell.

_Yes, I’m sure,_ she thinks.

Maggie bumps Stanford’s serve for her.

Caitlin delivers it to April.

April sends it flying, a work of art, into Stanford’s back right corner.

Caitlin does not ask a third time.

The crowd erupts. Caitlin retreats carefully from the Volleyball Void so she can erupt with them.

Everyone is going ballistic. It’s like being in a washing machine of sound and bodies and joy, and Caitlin feels her cheeks start to hurt even before she realizes she’s been smiling. Liv and Raquel bracket her in a bruising hug, and she feels that beautiful, familiar thing, that family-size, whole-box portion of love sweep through her.   
March runs toward the court. April runs toward her. They meet in the middle in the kind of hug that should by all rights be accompanied by a swelling orchestral soundtrack, a slow-motion movie reunion, intercut with a shot of the THAT’S MY GIRLFRIEND poster fluttering to the ground so that March can use both arms to heave April off the floor. April tucks her head into March’s neck until March puts her back down, and then, hands firmly bracketing her jaw, she kisses her.   
Caitlin knows that her hockey fan club is approaching because she can hear their screams even through her own.

“FUCK YEAH!” Holster screams at the top of his lungs, which is pretty goddamn loud.

“Oh, wonderful!” Bitty exclaims, looping his arms around Lardo’s shoulders. 

Liv and Raquel jump forward to greet Nursey and Dex, who they get along with wonderfully despite everything.

And then there’s Chris. Smile wide as it ever is. She wonders if there’s actually a halo of golden light around him or if she’s just so in love she’s hallucinating one.

“Farms!” he cries delightedly, voice breaking with a combination of emotions.

She feels the small grain of certainty expand so big she can’t even talk, so she just throws her arms around his middle.

Caitlin remembers a friend telling her once that she liked having a boyfriend who was more than six inches taller than she was. She said she liked how he made her feel “tiny and cute.” And it’s not that Caitlin doesn’t respect that, or understand the places that it comes from, but she couldn’t relate. At that point, she’d never fallen in love. She hadn’t known if that was what she was missing.

But Chris—Chris has never once made her feel small.

She buries her sweaty face in his shoulder, inhales the cologne he steals from Nursey on special occasions, and she smiles privately to herself as she feels sure.   
Not now. Not today. Probably not until graduation—which is a long time, but she can hack it, because she wants to give him a fair shot at answering—but it’s going to happen.

She’s going to ask Christopher Chow to marry her.


End file.
